The networked computing environment (e.g., cloud computing environment) is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further enhanced by one or more additional abstraction layers (e.g., a cloud layer), thus making disparate devices appear to an end-consumer as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical computing engines, servers and devices, device memory, and storage devices, among others.
Challenges may exist, however, in implementing efficient software license allocation in a cloud computing environment. For example, in a typical cloud computing environment, a license is allocated per virtual machine (VM) or VM image/instance rather than being allocated for each software installation running on a particular VM (or VM instance). Given that multiple software installations may be running on a single VM instance, providing a single license for the entire VM instance may greatly limit usage of that VM instance.